Drug marketplace czar also accused of murder-for-hire plot.
by Cyrus Farivar
After nearly three years of operation, the notorious website The Silk Road has finally been shut down and its Tor-enabled domain name seized.
The Silk Road specialized in facilitating the sale of illegal drugs of all sorts via a hidden service website on Tor, conducting its business entirely in Bitcoin. Its founder, known only online via the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” has been identified by the Department of Justice as Ross William Ulbricht. The 29-year-old Texan was arrested in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The 39-page criminal complaint details not only charges of narcotics trafficking and money laundering, but also soliciting “a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.”
Testimony in the indictment from Christopher Tarbell, an FBI agent specializing in cybercrime, noted that “the site generated sales revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected commissions from these sales totaling over 600,000 Bitcoins. Although the value of Bitcoins has varied significantly during the site’s lifetime, these figures are roughly equivalent today to approximately $1.2 billion in sales and approximately $80 million in commissions.”
The complaint also notes that law enforcement agents had "made over 100 individual undercover purchases of controlled substances from Silk Road vendors" since November 2011.
The Tor Project, whose software enabled the Silk Road, noticed a significant spike in usage in late August and was unable to explain it. It remains possible that the FBI or another federal agency may have suddenly flooded Tor with its own bots or other computers under its control as a way to conduct surveillance on the Silk Road.
A competitor, the Farmer's Market, was shuttered last year.
Courtesy: arstechnica
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